Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Finally the skies have run out of water. Today we hit 28 degrees in Windsor and there is not cloud in the sky, just a vast expanse of blue, sky blue, if you will. Just in time for the Olympics.

When we were in the midst of the gloom with the unrelenting rain lashing down I decided to come to terms with what we experiencing and draw comfort from the fact that it wasn't cold (just wet), that the rains served as a reminder of just how much the elements are uncontrollable in their variability, and that if you looked up into the sky there were some of the most amazing cloudscapes I have ever seen, with clouds strongly backlit with a bright sun (I took the above pic from my bedroom window as a memento of rainy days past.) - admittedly I was putting a (Pan)gloss over the whole affair, but sometimes you have no choice in the matter.

As an added bonus, it also gave the sharp tongued something to bitch about. Here's Charlie Brooker, sticking it to the UK weather system:

"Apologies for swearing in an opening sentence, but have you seen the
shitbastard sky we've been having lately? In case you don't recognise it
at first glance, it's that bruise-coloured ceiling of floating misery
that has been remorselessly flinging cold water over everyone and
everything in the nation for weeks now. There's moss growing on the
inside of clouds up there. The British summer has long been a work of
bleak fiction but this year it morphed into full-blown dystopian satire.

Oh,
there are flashes of blue here and there, but they function much like
the speedboat prize at the end of a vintage episode of Bullseye: nothing
but a cruel reminder of what you could have won. So the weather
turns nice for 25 minutes in the late afternoon. You put your
sunglasses on and step outside. But by the time you reach the end of the
street, the winds are howling, the heavens are weeping, and it's
frosted piss city all round.

On and on it goes. It's got to the
point where pulling back the curtains each morning feels like waking up
in jail. No, worse: like waking up inside a monochrome Czechoslovakian
cartoon about waking up in jail. The outdoor world is illuminated by a
weak, grey, diseased form of light that has fatally exhausted itself
crawling through the gloomy stratospheric miasma before perishing feebly
on your retinas. Everything is a water feature. We're on the Planet of
the Snails."